“It seems as though he was going to say something sometimes, but I kill it out of him. I wonder what is the matter with me, anyway?” Miss Lucinda had acquired a habit of talking to herself, and now nodded gravely to her reflection in the little mirror over the kitchen shelf. “I’m not bad-looking and I mean to be pleasant, but, somehow most folks seem kind of afraid of me. I s’pose I have an up-and-coming way with me that scares most of them. I don’t seem to be the sort they take to; though I must say it’s forlorn to be that way,” and the image in the mirror sighed audibly.
When Miss Lucinda had seated herself at her lonely tea-table, her thoughts took another channel. “What in the world am I to do with a boy? He’ll upset things on the table-cloth, and let flies in the house and rub his fingers on the window-pane, and holler. Well, there’s one thing about it, he’s got to mind every word I say to him!” But here Miss Lucinda drew herself up with a jerk. “There you go, Lucinda, complaining of your loneliness, and then finding fault when someone comes to see you; thinking you’re too fond of running things, and then saying you’re going to make this boy do just as you want him to.”
It was only a few days later when the boy came, in company with the minister. He was not so large a boy as Miss Lucinda had expected from his age, and he was rather thin and pale.
“I’ll give him enough to eat, that’s one thing,” she told the minister. “And I’ve been thinking there’s one comfort in a boy: he doesn’t talk so much as a girl—that is, he isn’t likely to.”
“No, he isn’t likely to,” the minister assented, a little doubtfully.
After the minister had gone, Miss Lucinda began to wonder what she should do with the boy the rest of the morning. She found him in the kitchen, his short legs stretched to their utmost, trying to capture two flies buzzing on the window-pane. He paused in his exertions, and turned on her with a beaming smile.
“Hullo! Is dinner ready?” he asked.
Miss Lucinda drew herself up. “We don’t have dinner till twelve o’clock,” she said frigidly.
“Oh, that’s all right; you needn’t hurry,” the boy said pleasantly. “I’m kinder grub-struck, but I guess I kin wait.”
Miss Lucinda stared at him in rebuke. “Perhaps you’d better go out and play,” she suggested, “while I get dinner;” and off he went.